


Who's Who

by ModernWizard



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Amnesia, Consensual Kink, Doctor Who Feels, Dorks in Love, F/M, Fluff and angst simultaneously, Gen, Happy Ending, Hopeful Ending, Humor, Identity Issues, Mistaken Identity, Post-Regeneration (Doctor Who), The Doctor Has Issues (Doctor Who), The Master Has Issues (Doctor Who), Time Lord Angst, Time Lords and Ladies, Time Lords are shit
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-28
Updated: 2020-03-28
Packaged: 2021-02-28 20:54:54
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,388
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23363536
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ModernWizard/pseuds/ModernWizard
Summary: Two Time Lords regenerate simultaneously. One of them looks like a brown-skinned man with black hair. The other looks like a peach-skinned woman with blond hair. One of them is obviously the Doctor, and the other is obviously the Master. Should be easy to figure out, right? Not so much.
Relationships: Thirteenth Doctor/The Master (Dhawan)
Comments: 15
Kudos: 110





	Who's Who

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by [a thread](https://natalunasans.tumblr.com/post/613835354536034304/its-shameful-that-the-master-and-the-doctor-have) on Tumblr started by @lucifers-favorite-child, speculating about what would happen if D/M regenerated simultaneously and had no clue who they were, I wrote this Thirteen/Dhawan Master nonsense.

Somewhere in a secluded, bucolic corner of England, two Time Lords regenerated simultaneously. The black-haired one appeared from a cloud of golden artron energy. He was slightly built, with warm, middle brown skin. “Whoo! Ah! Wow!” He stumbled, caught himself, and flashed a grin at the audience. “That was a great entrance, right?” He tossed his head, flipping a loose lock of black hair from his eyes. “Ow, why do I have a stitch in my side?”

The blond one was too busy debuting from her own cloud to answer. “Ladies and gentlemen, you have just observed the amazing — apparating — man!” She spread out her arms, then looked down at herself. She was almost the same height as him, but with pale peach skin. “Uh, lady.” She tried the line again, with appropriate fanfare and gesture: “The amazing — apparating — lady!” Tucking a lock of bleach blond hair behind an ear, she turned to the black-haired one. “Oh yeah! It was a great entrance! Very whooshy and sparkly! I like sparkles! Impressive...except for the stumbling part.”

“Well, yours had a certain old-fashioned panache,” allowed the black-haired one, “and the choreography was classic. I always did like the classics… But come on!  _ Come on!” _ He squinched up his face in a sudden burst of temper. “You messed up your lines. Points off for clumsy execution.”

“Hey!” The blond one pointed at the black-haired one, her finger about two centimeters from his nose. “Don’t do points! I do points. Points are my thing.”

“How would you know?” he scoffed, circling her. “We don’t know the first thing about ourselves.”

Her pointing finger became an ‘Ah hah, I got an idea!’ finger, raised in the air. “Regenerations! We just went through them. I know that.”

“Congratulations! And we’re Time — uh, well, I was gonna say Time Lords, but the ‘Lords’ part doesn’t seem to fit. You know — sort of like this corset. Excuse me.” Finally recognizing why his abdomen hurt, he untucked his blouse from his skirt, yanked around, ripped off the corset, and launched it away.

“You’re still busting out of your shirt,” she observed.

“And you’re still swimming in yours,” he replied. While his clothes were too tight and tailored, obviously made for someone much smaller and curvier, hers were long, droopy, and made for a much taller person. “Ah hah! Let’s switch.”

“Good idea. I don’t know how many times I’ve tripped over these cuffs.” She held up a foot, over which her trouser cuff drooped all the way.

“Probably a lot!” he teased, turning around. He undressed and threw his clothes over his shoulder to her. She was doing the same thing.

“Shut up and put my trousers on!” she said. Said trousers hit him in the head.

“Shut up and put my skirt on,” he said. Said skirt hit her in the head. 

A moment later, he turned around, tucking his [formerly her] shirt in. “Oh wait! Hah hah! I should have asked you if regeneration made you forget how many times you tripped on your trousers.”

“Huh?” She turned around.

“You know — since you couldn’t remember, and regeneration clearly comes with a certain amount of amnesia. Get it? Get it?”

“Uh...yeah. Weirdo.”

“Okay. Whew! Slightly better. At least I’m not being nipped and poked everywhere. I’m still devastatingly beautiful, though. Obviously.” He flicked his hair from his face.

“Yeah! Phew!” She, ignoring him, buttoned the last button on her blouse, but refused to touch either the corset or the pumps. “That was a good idea. I don’t feel like an eternal kid anymore.”

“Eternal kid?”

“Yeah — you know — because the clothes were too big for me. So I was like a kid dressing up in an adult’s clothing.”

“I got that. I got that! It’s just that the phrase rang a bell. What was it? What — was — it? Eternal kid, eternal child, kid out of time, timeless kid? Ugh, who knows?” He shook his head, his shoulders, his whole body with momentary frustration. Then he pulled himself together. “So apparently, along with the regeneration, we’ve also had some obfuscation.”

“And it’s causing — uh, let’s see — oh snap!” She bounced on her toes. “I’ve got one! It’s causing consternation.”

“‘Oh snap’ isn’t like ‘Ah hah,’” he interrupted. “It’s more like ‘Oooh, you just got told.’”

“It means ‘Ah hah!’ if I want it to.” She wrinkled her nose at him. “And  _ oh snap,” _ she said with emphasis, getting really close to his face again, “I just thought of a rhyme. Regeneration causes obfuscation  _ and _ consternation. Put  _ that  _ in your hat and smoke it!” He blinked several times. “Okay, that one was definitely wrong,” she admitted.

“Mmm hmmm hmmm…” Humming to himself, he paced, stroking his beard and shaking his head slightly along with his thoughts. “Besides some consternation, there’s also some complication because — it’s the strangest thing, but, up here, in my mind,” he said, tapping his temples with his pointer fingers, “there are two possibilities, two people I could be: the Doctor — “

“—And the Master!” finished the blond one.

“But I don’t — I don’t — I don’t know which, though.” The black-haired one flapped his hand. “Do you think those are supposed to be actual names?” he asked after a moment.

“They sound more like titles to me.” The blond one scrunched her nose dubiously.

“Yeah. Like, if you say you’re the Doctor — and I’m not saying that you are, but...if you were, you’d say, ‘I’m the Doctor.’” He took a theatrical step forward, like he was entering the spotlight, spoke grandly, like he was an amazing apparating lady. “Then any sensible person would be like, ‘Uh huh?’”

She nodded. “‘The Doctor of what?’ Or maybe,  _ ‘The _ Doctor? Why are you so special that there’s only one of you?’ Yikes.” The blond one scrunched her nose again, but in disgust this time. “I kind of hope I’m not the Doctor. The Doctor sounds really full of themself.”

“You know what’s even worse?” He, who had been pacing away from her, whirled dramatically and pointed at her. “‘Master.’ That’s not the title of anything anymore, at least not on Earth, where I’m having the feeling that I spend an inordinate amount of time. I mean here.”

“Yeah, same.”

“But seriously, can you imagine going up to someone and saying, ‘Hi, I’m the Master.’” The black-haired one bounced his eyebrows once. “Hah! They’d probably be like, ‘Uh, sorry, weirdo, but that is  _ not _ my kink.’”

“Even if it was, they’d be like, ‘Excuse me? Inappropriate! Conversation and negotiation first, dumbass.’” She paused. “On the other hand — oh snap! Got an idea. How nice of you to join me, idea. If it’s not an Earthling, that actually really might be their bag. So...since we’re not Earthlings...is it your kink? Because, if it is, then we—”

“—At least know who the Master is,” he concluded. “That is, we’ll know who’s a ludicrously insecure control freak enough to assume a title of universal domination. Tah dah!” He did jazz hands. “Hmmm, no, I don’t think that’s the right gesture for that kind of revelation. Maybe another dramatic twirl? A sinisterly arched eyebrow? A dramatic twirl  _ and _ a sinisterly arched eyebrow?”

“Yes! Right! And then the other one will obviously be the one who suppresses their feelings by frantically helping and healing everyone else at the expense of their own self! Brilliant!”

Pause. The black-haired one reflected for a while. “I really don’t want to be either of those people.”

The blond one sighed. “Yeah, me neither, so let’s stop talking about that. I hate introspection. I think I’m allergic. Gives me hives. So — dom or sub? Top or bottom?”

“Uhhhhhhhh...yes.”

“You can’t answer an either/or question with yes!”

“I just did,” the black-haired one pointed out.

“So I noticed. Smartass. Try again.”

“Or else what? Discipline and punishment?” He came close, flicking his eyebrows.

“Answer the question!” She folded her arms, trying hard not to smirk.

“C) Other.”

“That’s not an answer!”

“It’s an answer. It’s just not the one you want.”

“Okay, what does it mean?” She dropped her arms to her sides. “Does it mean like a binary choice—”

“—Can’t really describe you because you’re never just all one way or the other, but more like—” 

“ —Sometimes one way, sometimes the other, and—”

“—Sometimes both ways at once?”

“Yeah,” they decided together. “That’s what it means.”

“All right, so regeneration has completely erased all fundamentals of our individual identities,” said the black-haired one with a chuckle,  _ “except _ for kink. This probably goes to show something. I’m just not sure what.”

The blond one sighed again. “Well, so much for figuring out who the kinky bastard is. But...yeah...feeling two people inside you — that’s how I’m feeling too. It’s like the Master and the Doctor are inside me, and both their memories and experiences feel like my—”

“—Own,” the black-haired one interrupted. “Like I’ve done both of them — both sets of memories and experiences, I mean —  _ all _ of them. Like I’ve been both people, or I’ve been one of the people, but so close to the other that—” 

“I’m just not sure from which point of view. And that’s kind of weird because then it makes me think—”

“Well, what if they’re not two separate individuals, so much as they are—”

“—Different aspects of the same self?” they both finished.

“Yeah, buuuuuuut if that were the case—” started the blond one.

“Right, I know.” The black-haired one nodded. “That brings up the question of why we’re currently two physically distinct individuals.”

“The universe has a sense of humor?” 

“In that case, it’s laughing its ass off right about now.”

“Think! Think think think!” she cried.

“What do you think I’m doing?!” He rounded on her.

She drew back from his sharpness, turning her back, as she spoke over her shoulder. “Oh, I was just talking to myself. Yelling at my brain. C’mon, grey matter — you can do it. There’s got to be a simple, logical way to figure this out.”

“Yes, I know,” snapped the black-haired one, head bent in thought, as he walked away from her. “Way ahead of you. I was just thinking that.”

“Ah hah!” they both cried at once, snapping, turning, and pointing at each other. “What if—” 

“We introduced ourselves?” the black-haired one finished.

“Then maybe our names would come naturally!” The blond one nodded enthusiastically.

“I’ll go first. Ahem.”

“Why do you get to go first?”

“Because I’m awesomer.”

“Oh yeah? Based on what?”

He put his hands on his chest where his lapels would be if he had them. “Based on my internal sense of my own unassailable power, capacity, intellect, vision, and — you know —  _ awesomeness.” _

“If you were that awesome, you’d figure out how to keep your hair from flopping in your eyes,” she said under her breath.

“Yeah, well, you have floppy hair too. And it’s in your eyes too! So what does that say about you, huh? Also your roots are showing, and this luxurious mane is clearly all natural. Hmph.”

“You have a grey hair in your eyebrows,” she said accusingly, advancing on him.

“A grey—? What? No! I do not! Besides, how closely have you been admiring me anyway if you can tell  _ that, _ you...you...you...person with weird dark borders around your irises? Huh?”

“I have weird dark borders around my irises?!”

“Yeah, you do. The irises themselves are kind of a pale brown, but the color concentrates around the rims and darkens, as if they’re halos of shadow for the lights of your eyes.”

“And you — your eyes — they’re so big. It’s not fair! Why are your eyes so...so...big and...and...and...bright and expressive? Endless depths of clear, deep, dark light…” She stared, head slightly cocked, mouth slightly open, at his face.

He, now close enough to her to feel her breath on his face, widened his eyes and watched her haloed darkness eyes for a while. “Ahem. Well, like I said, I’m awesomer.”

“You’re conceiteder is what you are.”

“I’m pretty sure that the positive superlative form of ‘conceited’ is ‘more conceited,’ not ‘conceiteder.’”

“I’m pretty sure I don’t care. Go on. Introduce yourself.”

He cleared his throat. “Heh-hem. Peoples of the universe! Attend!”

“Psssst. No one’s listening to you except me.”

“Will you shut up? Great introductions are as importance as great entrances. So. Peoples of the universe, attend! I am the Time Lord — Individual — Person — Being — usually referred to as—”

“As…?” she prompted.

“As — oh. I guess I forgot. I forgot.” He flopped his arms to his sides. “How could I forget?” he asked himself. “How could I forget something — so — simple? Rrrrgh!”

“Don’t worry about it.” She gave him a friendly whack on the bicep. “Hello, Oh.” 

“Did you just stutter?” He glanced up from his self-recrimination.

“No, I just said, ‘Hi, Oh.’ That’s your name, isn’t it?” She laughed. “I’m the — uh — uh — uh — Well, I’m a traveler in space and time — I know that much!”

“Well done, Uh. You’ve figured out that you’re a traveler in space and time — just like me.” Oh rolled his eyes.

“Yeah, but are you a renegade, huh?” Uh bounced up toward his face again. “Did you steal your TARDIS?” 

“Yes, I am, and yeah, I’m pretty sure I did! So there. What about unique memories? Surely these two losers have some unique memories that will differentiate between them.”

“Oooh! I’ve got one! Red hills! Yeah, red hills!” Uh cried.

“Mount Perdition? Running for hours on the fields.” Oh smiled at the memory. He shimmied from side to side, from one foot to the other, like he might be readying to race himself.

“Yeah! Calling at the sky, right? Wait a minute…” Uh crinkled her nose. “Why were we yelling at the sky?”

“I seem to recall it was ‘Come and get me if you dare!’”

“It was! And the estates… Were those mine?”

“I thnk they were mine.”

“I thought they belonged to either your dad or mine.”

“Technically they probably did. What else about childhood?”

“Don’t think I really had one,” Oh muttered, hanging his head.

“Yeah, I can’t remember one,” Uh murmured, going still, rigid, staring off into space, “just obligation, duty, drills, the weight of tradition settling down around you like one of those big stupid collars.”

“And then, when we were just kids, the Untempered Schism.” Oh shook his head, blinking rapidly and trembling with his whole body.

“Exposure to the Time Vortex.” Uh nodded slowly. She tensed her whole body as if hardening it against emotion.

“The crack in the cosmos. The raveling of reality.”

“The first chute,” said Uh, “that you lose a few of your marbles down. Don’t think I was ever the same after that, you know?” She folded her arms tightly across her chest as if she was physically holding herself against dissolution.

“Me neither.” Oh frowned.

“Who exposes kids, innocent little kids, to something like that, something their brains can’t even comprehend? It’s cruel!”

“It’s mad.”

“Madness?” Going still again, Uh focused on something far, far away in the past. “I think I went mad after that. I lost something, some essential part of myself, into the Vortex.”

“Hearts?”

“Soul.”

“Yeah. You’d have to. I’d have to too.” Oh pressed his hand to his mouth, pushed the sob back, then tried to calm himself down.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, where are we from?” Oh threw up his hands. “Gallifrey, right? We’re Time Lords, who are supposedly the most advanced beings in all of space and time. We govern the Web of Time, deciding what happens and what doesn’t, all while hiding behind a hypocritical non-intervention policy. We think that we, as a people, are so wise, experienced, smart, and powerful that we should decide who lives and who dies.”

“Who lives and who dies? Is that what we’re deciding?” Uh froze, eyes wide. “I mean they. Is that what  _ they’re _ deciding? We can’t be.”

“It’s true.”

“It can’t. It can’t because I don’t want it to be.” Uh was holding herself so still that she shook slightly from the effort.

Oh advanced slowly, speaking softly. “But it’s true. If we pick  _ these _ timestreams to preserve in the Web and  _ those _ to erase—”

“Oh.” Uh’s whole face scrunched in dismay. Her body went limp.

“Then we’re deciding who lives and who dies,” he said.

“Yeah...we are. Yikes. No one should have that power. No wonder I ran away!”

“And our initiation—” he continued.

“Yeah, that wasn’t an initiation. That was an indoctrination. They were trying to make us just like them.”

“That’s what I’m saying!” he cried. “They used the Untempered Schism as part of it. Think about it. If we’re saying that looking into the Untempered Schism was madness, that it makes you start to lose your marbles—” He pointed at his temples.

“—That it starts a crack in your soul,” she went on, “to let the vortex of cruelty and uncaringness in—” 

“Then they showed us the Vortex deliberately. They were making us like them, arrogant and mean.” Oh’s face set into grim horizontal lines, weighed down by grief and anger. “That was part of our initiation. ”

“You mean our corruption,” muttered Uh, lowering her eyebrows.

“Yeah. Corruption. I’m… I’m so sorry.” He stepped closer to her, then hesitated, unsure how to touch her.

“I am too.”

“I’m glad I ran away. I’m glad you ran away. I’m glad that we both ran away.”

“At least we’re not the only ones. At least we’re not alone. There’s that.” Raising her head, she smiled at him, a wry smile, half forced.

“Yeah! So! Right! Anyway, apparently we’re both space fascists. Yeah. Awesome.” Oh rolled his eyes. “What about school — the academy?”

“The Deca!” She clapped her hands and almost literally jumped into the new subject with relief. “Those were wild times.”

“All ten of us — the outcasts of the outcasts.”

“The nerds of the nerds.”

“Skiving off of classes.”

“Tricking the tutors!” piped up Uh. “Good times!”

“Playing,” said Oh, boinking his eyebrows, “certain games with each other.”

“Of the sadomasochistic variety? Oh yes!” Uh glanced off to the side with a reminiscent smirk.

Oh counted on his fingers. “What was the collateral damage of that again? Five deaths, eighteen student transfers—”

“At least three outbreaks of mass nightmares, a very localized earthquake that swallowed a historically significant cemetery—” she interjected.

“Don’t forget Millanassa’s unexpected retreat to a hermitage,” added Oh.

“And the mini black hole under the stairs of the secondary dining hall! Hilarious!” She threw back her head and laughed.

“So, in other words,” he said, “we were both irresponsible and immature—”

“—And completely full of it,” summarized Uh with a chuckle. 

“Again — no differentiation there,” he said.

“But there’s got to be!” she insisted. “Somewhere there’s just got to be some difference — something that will tell us who we are. Hasn’t there?”

He sat on the ground. She sat next to him. “Disguise?” he suggested. “Relatively sure I pretended to be a human a lot.”

“Me too. I even went through a Chameleon Arch and forgot my whole Time Lord self,” she said. “Lived a whole life as a...human.”

“Me too. And then we were stuck at the end of the universe, weren’t we?”

“Oh! Oh yes! And we were making an impossible rocket to take the last of the humans to Utopia.”

“Right, so who was the masquerading human in that scenario — you or me?”

“I dunno. All I know is that you were brilliant, and I think I was admiring your ass.” She laughed.

He did too. “Ditto. Well, that doesn’t narrow anything down. Humans, though — I have an, uh, complicated relationship with them,” he said rather euphemistically.

“Oh yeah,” said Uh. “Always vacuuming them up in my grandiose schemes, I am. I mean — they’re almost always game, but still —”

“I know what you mean,” said Oh. “It’s like they’re powerless against you. I feel like I need them for an audience. Someone to laugh at my jokes, I suppose, to be impressed by my genius, and to assure me that I’m awesome.”

“I tell them everything’s going to be fine, even wonderful, that we’re going on adventures where they’ll learn about themselves and the universe!” said Uh. Holding her arms wide, she said, “And I inspire them with great speeches about hope and the indomitable human spirit!” 

“Yeah,” he said, “but do you walk the walk along with talking the talk?”

“I — uh — that’s what I don’t know. I suppose all that stuff about hope and found family and adventure is technically true, but they also seem to end up dead, at least recently. And it’s because of me, which really isn’t very hopeful at all.”

Oh twisted his mouth ruefully. “I’ve gotta say — I’ve been personally responsible for at least several companions’ deaths, especially in recent years. And, even if they’re not dead, they’re always different when I’m done with them, and it’s not usually a good difference. Hmmmm… Although I suppose it could arguably be said that there was that one occasion — No, never mind. That was a debacle, a sort of ‘allying with your enemy while also opposing your enemy and ending up shooting and stabbing yourself in the back’ debacle.”

“No, not always. I mean — I want it to be. I have the best of intentions.” She spoke softly, nodding periodically with sharp jerks of her chin, as if the force of those nods could turn her speech into reality. “‘Always do the right thing,’ I tell myself. ‘Never be cruel or cowardly. Always be kind.’ But…”

“Things never turn out the way I want. Grand ideas, wonderful schemes, visions to change the universe — they all come to naught.” He was quiet for a moment. “Hey, this might be a weird idea, okay? But hear me out. Do you ever feel like you’re doing some sort of weird Time Lord initiation with them somehow?”

“That you’re like the Untempered Schism for them, and they’re the kids dragged in without really knowing what they’re getting into? Yeah,” she said flatly.

“And then you open their minds or show them something — the end of the universe, maybe, or the final destruction of Earth — and, for a lot of them, it’s too much, or it’s too dangerous.”

“And they might crack under the strain,” said Uh.

“Or they might start to lose a few marbles,” added Oh.

“Oh no,” Uh whispered. “Are we — Are we doing to them what was done to us? We can’t be. No, we can’t be.”

“Oh, we can be,” said Oh, shaking his head. He leaned closed to her. “In fact, we very much are.”

“No… How… Why… That doesn’t make sense!” She hunched up, avoiding his words.

“Yes, it does. Of course it does,” he continued evenly and relentlessly. “And you know it does. People do to others what was done to them, unless they make a conscious, hard, constant effort to do otherwise. And here we are, you and me, masters of suffering, now inflicting that suffering on others.”

“Suffering…” Bringing her head up, she made an abrupt pivot of subject. “The war… There was a war, the Time War.”

“Oh. Yeah. That. I never wanted to fight.”

“Neither did I. I hated the thought of fighting so much that I somehow...ran away from myself? Does that even make sense?” Uh asked.

“You hid yourself from yourself?” suggested Oh.

Uh nodded absently. “But...somehow...I ended up fighting, and it was like I was a completely different person…”

“Taken over by a will that wasn’t my own… There was something in my head, driving me, compelling me to do horrible things…” Oh hung his head. Tears filled his eyes. He drew down into himself in his grief, pulling back from the world into his thoughts.

“To make impossible decisions…” She, by contrast, stared off into the distance at nothing. In her grief, she looked as far away as possible, as if she could follow her line of sight and escape bodily from the burden of sadness. Her eyes were dry.

“To decide who lived and who died, but I wasn’t the one making the decision.” Oh shook his head violently. “It was something else —”

“Yeah, something that wasn’t me, something implanted there by the Council. They reached in through the crack in my mind and filled me with their necessity, their duty, their  _ obligations _ —”

“And all of it just overwhelmed me, filling my mind, pounding, pounding,  _ pounding _ —” He clenched his fists against his forehead, and tears squeezed from his eyes.

“Beating down my self, my core, who I really was, until I thought that I had to submit.” Her lips barely moved; she was almost completely immobile. “I had to be a warrior.”

“I thought that I had no choice. No choice! How could I have thought that I had no choice?” He wept.

“But I did have a choice, and eventually somehow I realized that.” Her voice grew stronger as, with a great effort, she reeled herself back from the past.

“I decided — me under my own power — that I wanted no more of that. No more,” Oh repeated.

“And I ended it somehow. Deserted. Went AWOL.”

“I ran away.”

“Again,” she said gloomily. Then suddenly she exclaimed, “Okay! Let’s change the subject!”

He sniffled back snot. “You do that a lot. Like pathologically. What are you avoiding?”

She drew her head back on her neck with just the slightest of sneers. “Why, feelings! Obviously.”

“Why?” He cleared his eyes with the back of his hand.

“Well, because they’re drippy and runny and ugly and painful. I mean — look at you!”

“Not all of them. Some of them are quite enjoyable,” he protested. “Although I don’t seem to have had very many of those in my life, whoever I am.”

“Oh snap! Right! That’s why I always pretend like I only have happiness and excitement and stuff. It’s easier. Really.” She hoisted the corners up her mouth into an upward curve to convince him. The smile didn’t reach her eyes.

“That seems unhealthy,” observed Oh, “but whatever. I’m sick of crying.” 

“Executive decision! From this moment forth, we are no longer talking about our feelings. This is not,” she said, crossing her arms, “a therapy session.”

“Oh...hey...how about mind control?” he recalled, elbowing her. “I seem to remember a lot of alteration of humans’ perceptions.”

“No good.” She was back to staring out and away again, avoiding the here and now. “I erased people’s memories all the time, using history as a justification. ‘Can’t mess with established history!’ I kept saying — even though I did it all the flipping time myself.”

“I made people forget things all the time, just so that I could have my own way and make my life easier. How about murder? Manslaughter? Genocide? And I mean outside the context of the Time War. I’m responsible for — wow! — the deaths of so many people that I’ve lost count.”

“I don’t know how many people I’ve deliberately killed — or let die — or how many civilizations and timestreams I’ve wiped out.” Her voice was soft, flaccid, evacuated of spirit.

“Well, then I guess our Time Lord indoctrination really has served us well, huh? Look at us — the perfect space fascists.” He smiled bitterly, then noticed her clenched-up posture. “Oh… Oh no… Oh dear, I’ve really brought you down, haven’t I?” 

“What?” She looked at him quizzically.

He waved his hands. “Look at how low I’ve pulled you! But — I — This wasn’t supposed to happen this way!” 

“But I’m not low at all. At worst, I’m like...mildly bleh,” she assured him.

“You weren’t supposed to — I’m sorry. I’m sorry!” he said almost beggingly. His forehead creased up; his lips parted and shook.

“Don’t worry. I’m fine. Completely, totally, utterly, and truly fine. Really!” She smiled so hard that she made a silly grimacing face at him. 

“You’re a master of denial is what you are.” He imitated her expression. “Are you  _ sure  _ you’re okay?”

“Can’t break me anyway.”

“But I wasn’t trying to!”

“I live through everything: torture, indoctrination, wars, genocide, murder! I’m an expert at surviving.”

“Yay for you. So am I.” He was still subdued. 

She blew a huge exasperated breath out her mouth. “Ugh. So what’s gonna decide it? Who’s who?”

“Does it really matter?”

“Yes! Of course it matters!” Now she was the one snapping at him. Her pale brown eyes lightened and turned fiercer as she glared at him. “I am someone, someone important, someone powerful, someone on whom the fate of the universe depends, and I want to know who that is.”

“Me too. But, when both your choices are, well, equally rotten, does it matter which you pick?” Hunching his knees to his chest, he leaned his forehead on them and mumbled.

“C) Other.”

“Huh?” He sat up.

She now shone with an idea. Her face brightened; her hair seemed golder. She was inspired. “You know — I asked you if you were a dom or a sub, and you said, ‘C) Other.’ What if I’m not interested in being either the Doctor or the Master?”

“Yeah, I can’t say that I’m looking forward to the choice either.” He sighed in disgust.

“So...then...what if we don’t have to make that choice?” Springing forward, she seized his hands, drawing him closer to her. “What if we say, ‘C) Other? We’re neither. We’re other people besides them.’ What if we choose to be new people?”

Uh’s enthusiasm moved through her hands into Oh’s, warming him. “It could work,” he mused slowly. “No! No, it  _ will _ work! It  _ will! _ We’ve rebelled, run away, discarded our pasts, and started new lives before. Let’s do it again!”

“Yes! We’ll be free! We’ll start over! Now all we need is a Chameleon Arch.” She jumped to her feet, scanning the area for spare Arches. None were apparent. 

“No! No!” Oh bounced up after her, flapping his hands in distress. “If we forget our past, then it’s all too easy for us to become like we’ve been: miserable, cruel, cowardly. We have to remember. We have to remember what’s unhappy and wrong about the Doctor and the Master so that we know why we chose to be different people.”

“Yeah, but memory involves pain, and pain involves emotions, and I just — I don’t really like emotions — except for the happy ones. Those are fun. I hate the rest of them.” She folded her arms, turning away from him. 

“But our feelings — our emotions — those are what make us who we are.” He wrapped his arms around her from behind, clasping them in front. “We need that sadness, that anger, that regret at our cores, if we’re going to truly make a deliberate change and become the kinder, more thoughtful people that we’ve never been. Don’t you see? We  _ have to _ remember.”

“So then it’s not really running away, is it?” Twisting around in his arms, she narrowed her eyes at him. “You’re saying that we have to take the past with us. Instead of running away from our mistakes, we have to haul them along in our hearts.”

“Yeah,” he said softly.

She thought for a while, then spoke, her voice low. “That’s gonna be hard.”

“Yeah, I know you hate feelings.”

“Not just because of that, dumbass.”

“Yeah, it involves thinking about and accepting our past.” A memory cracked open inside him, schismatic, and he realized how many times he had never done that. Ever. He has always suppressed, run from, and avoided the consequences. “Evidently we’ve never really been good at that.” He swallowed hard, words dwindling away.

“Yeah, no. Oh no, Oh, what’s wrong?” Uh cried as his eyes filled with tears.

“Then what hope do we have? What hope do we have of changing? Why not just end it all, right now, forever?”

“Oh, listen to me. Listen to me.” She clasped her face in his hands, turning it toward her as gently as she would a flower. “We have hope, okay? We’re alive, and where there’s life, there’s hope, so we have hope. Even if it feels impossible and overwhelming, there’s still that spark somewhere, isn’t there? Think about it. Feel it. There’s a fire, right? Maybe it’s small, almost drenched by tears, but it’s there, right there, in your hearts.”

“In my hearts,” he repeated, staring dully into her eyes.

“Can you feel it? Right there? In your hearts?” Bringing her hands from his cheeks, she pressed them against his chest, one over each heart.

“Barely,” he said with self-contempt. “I feel pain mostly. Pain and a desire to kill something instead of dealing with my problems. Wow, I have horrible coping mechanisms.”

She persisted. “But  _ besides _ the pain,  _ besides _ the desire to kill something, it’s still there, right? That fire, that warmth, that spark, that essential light of who you are.”

“What if...I don’t have a light? What if I don’t have any better nature? What if I don’t have anything but pain?”

“But you do! You do!” She went up on tiptoes to be eye to eye with him. “Listen to me — you do! You may not feel that you do right now, but trust me — you do. I can see it. I can feel its warmth. I can hear its rhythm, even if you can’t. And it’s there, and it’s strong, and it’s enduring. It’s stronger than the Time Lords, stronger than fascism, stronger than the drums of war, stronger than the cries of pain, stronger than the explosions of anger, stronger than anything else.” Her voice quietened to almost inaudible levels, but she never stopped looking at him. “And, if you don’t trust yourself to feel it, then trust me. Do you trust me?”

“I… I… I don’t know who I am, and I don’t know who you are, but I trust you,” he whispered.

“Then trust me to hold your hearts, hold your pain, and hold your life for you when you can’t. Can you do that?”

“I… Well, I’d do the same for you, so...yes. You’d always do that for me?” His voice lilted upward slightly.

“Always.” She nodded with a sharp, strong conviction.

“You’d never run away?”

“Never. Not from you.”

A smile flickered around the edges of his lips, then finally alit there and bloomed. “Then...kneel.”

“Yes,” she said, dropping to her knees before him.

“Promise me something.” He knelt to her and took her hands in his, holding them up by their chests.

“Depends on what it is.”

“Stand with me.”

She raised an eyebrow at him. “Wait...are we standing now? Because I was just kneeling.”

“It was metaphorical, you dolt.” He rolled his eyes. “I meant metaphorically. Stand with me —  _ metaphorically. _ Be with me. Travel with me. Learn with me. Change with me. Do better with me.”

“It’s what I’ve always wanted,” she said. Her voice was muted, and he knew it was because she was repressing the tremor in it. “Match me; challenge me; equal me; partner with me.”

“Yes!” He squeezed her hands harder. “Be my equal. Watch out for me. Keep me accountable.”

“Make sure I’m better. Tell me when I’m acting like I used to.” She nodded faster.

“Remind me when I fall back into old patterns.”

“And if you’re really, really, really good—” 

“I’ll get some discipline and punishment?” he said again.

“Perhaps,” she said, doing an eyebrow bounce of her own. “But only between us, as our game. And no killing or incidental deaths.” 

“Yeah, no collateral damage.” He shook his head.

“No selfishness. No space fascism.”

“No more,” he vowed. “We’ll be compassionate. We’ll be kind. We’ll be thoughtful — and humble — and, uh, good. Or at least we’ll try our very best.”

“And we’ll succeed,” she promised him, “because we’ll learn from our past instead of forgetting it.”

“And we’ll do it together,” he said. “Ow, my knees hurt. Do your knees hurt? Patellae were never made to be weight-bearing bones.” He rolled back into a sitting position. “Ahhhh, much better.” She abandoned her position and sat by him once more. 

They leaned against each other, head against head, shoulder against shoulder, side against side. They had given themselves no names, but those could wait another moment, for they had given themselves something even greater. They had a past, a memory, a desire to do differently, a plan for how to be better, and the will to succeed. They would have no more aspirational names like ‘Doctor’ or ‘Master’ that they never lived up to, no matter how hard they tried. The names that they would soon give themselves would describe who they actually were. 

As they sat there silently, their breathing in rhythm, they both pondered synonyms for ‘person trying very hard to be better than they used to be.’ Could you even fit that into a snappy single-word title/name? Uh wondered if Oh had a thesaurus somewhere that they could use. Oh, meanwhile, was using the thesaurus he carried around everywhere with him because it was in his head.

Suddenly Oh flexed his whole body out. “Oh! Ah!  _ Fuck!” _

“Hey, at least buy me dinner first,” said Uh with a snort.

“No, you dumbass.” Oh shook his head at her. “I just remembered what I forgot that I should have said!”

“Mmm, not too good with improv then, are you?” Uh frowned teasingly at him. “I betcha you couldn’t make a screwdriver out of spoons!”

“Spoons? Why would I want to do that?” He flared his nose at her. “Who would do that anyway?”

“Me!” She tapped her breastbone, then nearly chest bumped him. “Boo yeah! Oh snap! I’m awesome!”

“Maybe a little,” he conceded. “Anyway, I  _ should have _ said —”

“Yeah.” She drew back from him enough to give him a skeptical smirk. “What amazingly witty thing should you have said?”

He tried to speak with a completely deadpan face, but his eyebrows kept twitching. “I should have said, ‘And if you’re really, really, really good, I’ll let you call me ‘Master.’”

Both of them managed to keep their mouths shut for a microsecond before bursting out into laughter.


End file.
